Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/536

532 given 21 titles, while the younger Kirch, the astronomer, has 27 titles. Euler, in the quarter of a century he lived in Berlin and worked in the academy, published in its transactions 121 complete treatises, through other channels at least 700 more, and, in addition, was the author of 32 quarto and 13 octavo volumes. La Grange, his successor, the discoverer of the calculus of variations, during the thirteen years of his life in Berlin published 52 important treatises, about 100 pamphlets and 10 large works. From 1746, when the era of publication really began, to 1771, 25 volumes of 'Transactions' appeared and 65 volumes of what are called historical writings. The publications were even more important between 1771 and 1786. The income of the academy at the death of the king was nearly $18,000, devoted, it was supposed, entirely to the discovery and extension of knowledge, and yet, as a matter of fact, expended to such an extent for buildings and the payment of salaries at the order of the king as to leave comparatively little for the support of original investigators, or for costly experiment and research. In fact the management of the academy, even under Frederick the Great, was so unsatisfactory as to furnish excuse for the formation of many learned societies in Berlin, in some of which members of the academy took a leading part. Thus in the philosophical society, which flourished from 1773 to 1798, men like Mendelssohn, whom the king would not have in the academy, Nicolai, Teller and Engel were prominent, and a society of naturalists was formed during this period by the aid of Gleditsch, the botanist, one of the famous men in the academy. Yet with all its failures, and the fact that it was so completely under French influence, there can be no doubt that the Prussian Academy of Science and Fine Arts at the death of Frederick the Great had become the center of the scientific and critical movement in Germany, and was regarded all over Europe as a worthy rival of the Royal Society of Great Britain and of the French Academy in Paris.